In restaurants, especially quick service (fast food) restaurants, fast, consistent, efficient and safe food preparation is essential for a successful operation. The quality of the prepared food depends in large part on the consistency of food preparation. The food must be cooked under correct conditions for the proper time.
Consistency in food preparation can vary as a result of many factors. For example, people engaged in food preparation often must perform multiple tasks at frequencies that vary with time because of constantly varying customer demand through the day. For example, lunch and dinner time may be extremely busy while other periods may be relatively slow. The product mix can vary from hour to hour and day to day. As a result, the consistency and quality of food may vary. Difficulties in proper scheduling of food production during peak and non-peak periods can cause customer delays and/or stale, wasted or unusable food.
Food preparation is labor intensive, and the labor cost is a large portion of the total cost of the prepared food. An additional problem is that in sparsely populated and other areas where quick service restaurants are located, such as along interstate highways, for example, recruiting sufficient numbers of suitable employees is difficult.
Quick service restaurants must be able to effectively meet a variable customer demand that is time dependent and not subject to precise prediction. As a result, stores relying totally on human operators will at times be overstaffed and at other times be under-staffed.
Also, problems and potential problems can exist in restaurants where people directly prepare food. Health and safety concerns can also be present where food is prepared directly by people. By reducing or minimizing human contact with food and food cooking equipment, health and safety concerns can also be reduced or minimized. For example, in the frying of foods, some type of hot fluid, such as cooking oil, must be utilized. The cooking temperatures required can present a concern for health and safety.
Although quick service restaurants have existed for many years and now number in the tens of thousands, such establishments utilize people to prepare and process food. While there have been various improvements in commercial equipment used for cooking food in quick service restaurants, all are manually operated and are relatively labor intensive.
Accordingly, a need exists for a commercially suitable food preparation device, system and method that can be operated by a robot and that provides improvements in food preparation, especially in any or all of the previously mentioned areas. It would also be beneficial if such a system could make use of existing commercial equipment.